Foreign language studies are overlooked. A mandate would change that.

Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.

Last summer, I spent two months studying Hindi in Jaipur, India. Living there was an incredible experience, and as a part of my program, I had no choice but to speak Hindi.

Even if I faltered and spoke English, others continued to speak in Hindi as if nothing had happened. Within two months, I was very comfortable reading, writing, speaking and breathing the language. A key part of the program was for me to pick up Hindi as a second language. But for everyone around me, English was their second, third or even fourth language, which they still knew well enough to understand every word I said and subsequently respond in Hindi as needed.

Students across the University of Maryland want to change the world, but if they can’t communicate with people around the world, how are they planning to do that? This university must make foreign language courses mandatory for students across campus — a move that would probably be a little controversial, but would make our student body more prepared for their futures.

The languages, literatures and cultures school offers programs in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Of the most spoken languages in the world, we seem to be missing a few.  In addition, many students on campus don’t have a language requirement.

Computer science majors have no specific foreign language requirement, but students have to complete an upper-level concentration, which could be a language course. But majors in the arts and humanities college have to complete a global engagement requirement, which could be fulfilled with a foreign language, study abroad or an “individualized experience.” The global engagement is intended to encourage cultural competency, but do students in other colleges not need to be culturally competent?

Of course, the response to this would be, “But most people around the world speak English!” To which I have to say, “so what?” We already exist in a world where people are constantly adjusting to the fact that many Americans only speak English.  As I think about it further, I still don’t understand why.

We have a responsibility to understand other people — and help them — the same way they do for us. Not taking the energy to learn a new language, provided here at school, makes us seem unwilling to adapt to a rapidly changing world. But of course, this begins the changes that must be made to this university’s language requirements.

Our school seeks to provide the education of a “Public Ivy,” but doesn’t deliver a curriculum that will ensure our education is as holistic as possible. Language learning is a critical skill and part of early childhood development that is part of why we are who we are, which makes continuing the learning all the more important to continue into college.

As someone who grew up in a trilingual household, I’ve never felt more like we all need to be learning new languages. My parents did their best to teach me as much as they could, but once I got to college, two things changed. First, I was no longer listening to either Marathi or Hindi every day. Second, there was no way for me to continue learning either language on this campus because neither one is taught here. Plus, I had no reason to even seek them out without a requirement — my high school credits snuck me out of the international relations language requirement — and who, truly, is to say that I can actually speak Spanish today?

If this university were to implement a mandatory foreign language requirement, we wouldn’t be alone. Dozens of colleges across the country implement a mandatory foreign language requirement for graduation, and thousands of students have graduated from these schools able to communicate beyond one language. The requirement would help enhance our collective understanding of global cultures and languages and open the pathway for the university to provide the curricula for more language offerings. We could learn languages like Hindi, Urdu, Indonesian, Turkish and Tagalog, among others.

With such a requirement, every student on campus would benefit from understanding a new culture, a new language and a new group of people whom they seek to learn more about. We as a community have embraced diversity, but where is our commitment to it? Mandating languages and expanding the program are excellent places to start.

Jahnavi Kirkire is a senior government and politics and public policy major. She can be reached at [email protected].